sniff sniff...Do I smell 2nd edition mistakes?

[Orius]

Personally, I think that no matter what WotC does, they're going to be second-guessed. It seems like it's a curse from the days of Lorraine at T$R they inherited when they bought the company. T$R burned a lot of gamers badly, that these gamer are suspicious of anything WotC does.

Now, I'm not saying WotC is perfect, they make mistakes. I think their assessment of how badly settings did for TSR economically tends to make them think fairly conservatively when it come to planning product. A lot of gamers didn't want 9 different settings out their competing for their money, and DMs didn't like having one player who prefered one setting, another who prefered another, and so on with little or no agreement. I see this somewhat in the whole way 3e is being marketed. They got the Realms, because it's popular. They keep Greyhawk around as a nod to D&D tradition. They dump everything else, because it fragments the market, and that fragmentation is what killed TSR. People like crunch because it's easier to port into a game, where fluff is harder to insert, especially if a campaign's been around for a while. I think too much crunch isn't necessarily good either, yes 3e can be dry at times. But I suspect if WotC put more fluff in their books, people would just gripe about how bad that fluff is.

 

[hong]

Elaborate please.

The phrase "pearls before swine" comes to mind.

My head hurts from hulking hurlers breaking planets with one blow, dervishes whirlwind attacking 30 things in one round, persistant divine power at 7th level and infinite XP loops with thought bottles.

Are we finished scaremongering yet?

Somehow "honey leather" just doesn't really stack up.

That might be your problem right there.

 

[Crothian]

You could NEVER say in good faith today "Anything in that book goes" when refering to a non-core book.

and yet oddly enough I do that all the time. There are plenty of great books out there that 100% of the material is useful and good. I'll give a few examples: Spells and Magic (Bastion), Magic (AEG), Dynasties and Demagogues (Atlas), Wildscape (FFG), Stone and Sttel (Monkey God). It does come down to persoan taste and what people like in their games. I imagine since my games focus much mor eon role playing then the rules there might be people who have some problesmwith these books especially when they are used with other books that they were not designed to be used with. d20 is about options and about being able to use the options together, it is no longer a game for just anybody.

 

[DungeonMaster]

Okay, this is a start. (That was great help Hong).

Elven plate mail, stapling shot, double arrow shot, elf-only mithril artificial limbs, flavor text that described elves as being superior to all other races in every single way, and the frighteningly overpowered Bladesinger class kit. Just to name a few.

How exactly is elven plate mail broken? Is it any less broken than say something I pull out of the arms and equipement guide book? Or a core +5 mithral buckler with 0 ACP?

Stapling shot is broken because you must be standing near wood or plaster?

Double arrow shot is akin to plain rapid shot? No?

Artificial limbs are um broken how? How about your vanilla multi-armed 3.5 monster
template? Or plain polymorph? Or a thri-kreen?

How exactly is a bladesinger overpowered, are you suggesting a 12/15 fig/wiz cannot be replicated by say an eldricht knight in 3.5?

 

[DungeonMaster]

Spells and Magic (Bastion), Magic (AEG), Dynasties and Demagogues (Atlas), Wildscape (FFG), Stone and Sttel (Monkey God).
d20 is about options and about being able to use the options together, it is no longer a game for just anybody.

Thank you Crothian, I've never heard of these and I'll definitely take a look. I'll take your word that they're better designed than the WOTC fare and those third party d20 I have read.
d20 is perhaps about options but the framework of options is in my opinon, awful.
I play 3rd edition, I run 3rd edition and I've grown that I can't stand what it has become.

 

[eyebeams]

2nd Edition just wasn't that bad. Sorry -- just wasn't.

For the most part, the core rules were superior to the first edition, from THAC0 to proficiencies. The rules also had hidden benefits, such as Intelligence being an good stat for Fighters (bonus proficiency slots were not limited to nonweapon proficiencies). It was a solid successor to AD&D. It wasn't flawless, but it wasn't terrible. I know plenty of folks who play successful 2e games. 2e also had a flawed but appreciated attempt at class construction rules. This isn't in the game in 3e, and third party attempts have not been particularly inspiring.

The Complete series? Also, not bad, when used in context. There were later exceotions, but the Complete Fighter and Thief are excellent for their period. Complete Fighter's stun point system and weapon groups are both great. It ignored fighter-only weapon specialization, but it did it for a good reason.

The Complete Elf is one of those books where the author went out on a limb and presented elves in full Tolkienesque, Gil-Galad style. The book was up front about this agenda and catered to high-powered games where elves were superior, epic heroes. This is not a flaw, because the book *says* that's what it's doing.

The trouble here is that with the Complete books being self-contained (most of them implied that you'd be running a game where that character type was the focus of the campaign), using a bunch of them together was bad for the game. But refusing to take tresponsibility for proper use of the books? Enh -- drek.

It's in the latter 2/3 of 2e where it starts to seriously go south, thanks to a combination of TSR's management problems and the simple fact that the line was aging. 3e will also have problems that just come up because the game is getting long in the tooth. It happens.

 

[MerricB]

It's in the latter 2/3 of 2e where it starts to seriously go south, thanks to a combination of TSR's management problems and the simple fact that the line was aging. 3e will also have problems that just come up because the game is getting long in the tooth. It happens.

Mind you, there were problems from the beginning - witness the Complete Priest's Handbook(1990), which spent about 80 of 128 pages discussing a faith system that, though a good idea, was completely on a different power level from the Player's Handbook!

Cheers!

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

First of all, *I* use all of the complete books with no changes to them at all, so I'm not sure how anyone can state they are so unbalancing. So, yes, it's possible. No, I've never had a player try to do millions of damage with a combination. If there was such a combination, I probably wouldn't even ban the feats or prestige classes that caused it, I'd just ban people taking all of them at the same time that caused the imbalance.

I haven't had the severe imbalance that I did in my second edition games since switching to 3rd edition. I've always pretty much had a policy of "if it's in an official book, I'll likely allow it". So, I allowed all the kits from all the books. After a while in 2nd ed, though I started reading through them carefully as each player wanted to be one of them as I had discovered a number of them that seemed way too powerful. Be a swashbuckler, you can go up as fast as a thief, but attack as well as a fighter while still having all the thief skills(and if I remember correctly, you got more hit points or something like that too). What is the disadvantage for all this extra power? Trouble is supposed to find you easier than everyone else. What does this mean? Guess it depends on the DM. The examples in the book make it sound like women fall in love with you easy and you are continually getting into bad situations because of it. Most of my players said "Great! People attack us? More XP!" or it never came into play because the adventure was a dungeon crawl and DMs couldn't find a way to work this disadvantage into the game.

 

[Psion]

The problem with that is that settings are defined as much by what is not in them as by what is in them. The Forgotten Realms doesn't have warforged. It doesn't matter if they'd be perfectly balanced in the Forgotten Realms, they don't exist there and it would damage whatever internal consistency is left in the realms if Warforged suddenly started popping up.

LOLOLOL!

That you would use the Forgotten Realms in this example is humorous and ironic. The setting that absorbed aspects of almost every other setting that TSR/WotC published, with the authors backfitting explanations for why they belong in the Realms.

 

[Psion]

I liked Sword and Fist.

*laughs maniacally at the thought of the convulsions triggered by this one single sentence*

I'm sure if we could unearth posts on Eric's old boards, you might find a few bouts that I have with the constant S&F critics about its utility.